Thursday, May 31, 2012

"The
chitta, by its own nature, is endowed with all knowledge. It is made of sattva
particles, but is

covered by rajas
and tamas particles; and by pranayama this covering is removed."
-----Vivekananda, “ Raja Yoga”

The essence of
Raja Yoga and its rigorous practice through eight steps is well illustrated in
the commentary of Yogasutra of Patanjali by Swami Vivekananda. In this
commentary the above statement figures. Then the basic question that comes to
one’s mind is how can the chitta, which in its basic nature is pure and endowed
with all knowledge, be corrupted?

The limitation
of language in explaining this situation becomes apparent as Swami Vivekananda resorts
to objective physicality in trying to clarify the process of defilement of pure
consciousness.

It is as though
we need to assign an objective framework to first understand chitta and then define
an attribute of a pure constituent, sattva particles, being its nature. The
defiling process is then described by accumulation of Rajas and tamas
particles.

In order to have
a deeper understanding it is necessary to elaborate this process from a
non-objective dimension. We can proceed from the remedy that has been suggested; namely, the practice of ‘Pranayama’. Pranayama is the technique that one develops
over many years of practice of controlling the prana or the vital force in the
human body. Unlike many practitioners who assume that pranayama has to do with controlled
breathing, it is the practice of controlling the nadi currents through the aid
of controlled pulsation of the right and the left lungs which is accomplishes
by the control of breathing.

It is the imbalance
in the flow of the vital life force which causes consciousness modification.
These modifications are karmic inheritance in material nature. The sattva
particles can be thought of as pure ground potential state which defines the
ground of being of pure consciousness. The mind operates in a reflective mode
of pure consciousness and hence it acquires certain distorted characters
contributed by the positively or negatively agitated state of the mind
represented by the Rajas or Tamas particles.

Here we can
recall the wisdom of Yama as he instructs Nachiketa in Katha Upanishad the
hierarchy of the human mind:

“Beyond the
senses there are the objects, beyond the objects there is the mind, beyond the
mind there is the intellect, the Great Self is beyond the intellect. Beyond the
Great there is the Undeveloped, beyond the Undeveloped there is the Person
(purusha). Beyond the Person there is nothing--this is the goal, the highest
road. That Self is hidden in all beings and does not shine forth, but it is
seen by subtle seers through their sharp and subtle intellect.” ……Chapter 6
verse 10-12

Words of wisdom
from a contemporary teacher reflects the process I have been explaining:

“Every thought,
feeling, perception, or memory you may have causes a modification, or ripple,
in the mind. It distorts and colours the mental mirror. If you can restrain the
mind from forming into modifications, there will be no distortion, and you will
experience your true Self.” ……………..Swami
Satchidananda

Hence it is not
the pure consciousness which is modified but the reflection in the mind which
operates at a much lower plenum. The Ashtanga Yoga defined by Patanjali is a
process of eliminating the acquired and induced modifications of the perceptual and
conceptual mind which operates under the influence of the Ego.

Saturday, May 19, 2012

“It moves and
moves not; It is far and likewise near. It is inside all this and It is outside
all this.” …………..…..Verse 5, Isa
Upanishad

In this verse we
are dealing with a juxtaposition of contradicting concepts. The three concepts
of mobility, linear distance and three dimensional space are juxtaposed in
defining the reality of the Self. Deeper examination will reveal that these
three concepts can be unified into a single concept of space-time or the four
dimensional world in which we live. All mental constructs such as concepts,
thoughts, memories and hence our perceptions are the structural variance of
four dimensional space-time.

The deeper
reality of the Self which is addressed in various translations and commentaries
as ‘It’ or ‘That’ has been best adopted by endowing a neutral and ambiguous
attribute, which is the best one can do within the limitation of language.

Most
commentaries have been written by various scholars and Gurus with the primary
intension of communicating the meaning of the verse while being extremely
sensitive to the grasping level of the audience. There is also the direct
influence of the school of Vedic philosophy to
which the authors of the commentaries belong.

The commentaries
also address the marga through which
one’s consciousness has to be evoked to a higher level. The commentaries by Adi
Śaṅkara are
primarily influenced by the advaita (nondualism) philosophy and Jñana marga and
hence the concept of Nirguna Brahman. The commentaries of His Divine Grace A.
C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupāda, are influenced by Sri Krishna consciousness
and are primarily rooted in Bhakti marga through the concept of Saguna Brahman.
Both routes effectively communicate the meaning and intension behind the words
of the verse.

My personal
reflection is rooted in understanding the nature of reality which is revealed
to us today by science. The gap between the physical and the metaphysical has been narrowing down through the current level of understanding in the field of particle and Quantum physics. Those of you who are regularly reading my articles and
writings would sense the direction I am taking.

The fundamental
nature of all manifestations can be irreducibly scaled down to what in Physics
is called ‘Vacuum Energy’. This energy is the result of constant cancellation
of virtual particles at the level of the sub-Quantum manifold. This energy is
calculated to be extremely high. Though there is constant action of vibrating
between existence as particle-antiparticle pairs, there is absolute vacuum and
absence of action at the perceptual and measurable level. (the potency of the
vacuum energy is calculated only through a mathematical construct).

Quantum
entanglement, about which I have written a number of times, is a phenomenon beyond
space-time constrains. This has been theoretically proposed by the Bell Theorem
and experimentally verified by leading
researcher such as Alan Aspect and others. For Quantum entanglement, the entangled particles have to originate from
the same source and this is a clear mandate for all creation from Big Bang to
be entangled to the primary source at the most fundamental level but only manifested as duality through our
limited space-time consciousness.

From the above
two scientific facts, the fundamental realty or the true Self is beyond
space-time constraints. "

My personal
understanding is that this knowledge which we are exposed to in the 21st
century is the same which our Vedic Sages intuitively understood but had to
write down within the limitations of language and culture.

Sunday, May 13, 2012

In their well
researched and concisely written book “The Wisdom of the Serpent: The Myths of Death,
Rebirth and Resurrection”, Joseph Henderson and Maud Oakes say:

“The
element of sacrifice and sacrament, of dismemberment or immolation, which is so
common in all the myths of the dying and resurrecting gods whether as youths or
maidens, is reflected in Inanna's descent, by her willingness to make the
sacrifice of the symbols of worldly power (her garments and jewels) during six
or seven stages into the place of death. She is ready to risk all for an
uncertain return to life reborn. What is chiefly remarkable is that the myth of
rebirth never fails; the ravished daughter or the dead son-lover is always
resuscitated: Inanna, though "turned into a corpse" and "hung
from a stake," is always brought back to life.”

The events
relating to Inanna and Tammuz, Isis and Osiris, Cybele and Attis, Aphrodite and
Adonis, in the Sumerian, Egyptian, Greek and Roman myths all are varied shades
of the same theme of a sacrifice unto death with an impending rebirth of which
there is no certainty when the journey to death is undertaken. What are these
myths trying to tell us. The characters in the myths have a great relevance to
the Jungian archetypes of the collective unconsciousness. The story of the
descent to the underworld by Inanna is very illustrative of the purpose with
which the mythologem is constructed.

If we take a
close look at the human life, the gross body and astral body are in constant
bond, likened to lovers, but in the process, influencing each other both in
their constituent structure as well as in their existential attributes which
are beyond space-time. At physical death the separation of the lovers, namely
the gross body and the astral body, occurs. The gross body , which is
represented in the myth of the descent of Inanna, as the heavily bedecked,
jewelled and costumed Inanna descends through seven levels casting off the
ornaments and clothes to appear in her full nakedness in the underworld. This
dissolution or dismemberment in various other myths points to the
disintegration of the gross body which is always associated with the male
principle or Shiva in Vedic mysticism as the saguna deity of destruction.

The female principle which is always associated with Divine wisdom or
the Shakti symbolism is associated with the astral body which is held in
hibernation until the God of wisdom, Enki whose daughter was Inanna, sends ‘gala-tura’
and the ‘kur-jara’ to revive Inanna and bring her back to the living world.

In the narration
of the myth, ‘gala-tura’ and the ‘kur-jara’ are two androgynous or asexual
beings and they are given the power of astral travel (the myth says “Go and
direct your steps to the underworld. Fly past the door like flies. Slip through
the door pivots like phantoms.”). There is a very deep esoteric content in these words.
The astral body is revived to take a gross form in rebirth through a messenger
field which is denoted by its asexual and hyper-dimensional attribute.

The
encapsulation of individual consciousness is beautifully brought out in the
following lines; “So when Inanna left the underworld, the one in front of her,
though not a minister, held a sceptre in his hand; the one behind her, though
not an escort, carried a mace at his hip, while the small demons, like a reed
enclosure, and the big demons, like the reeds of a fence, restrained her on all
sides.”

The sceptre points to the directional vector of destination and ultimate life empowerment and the mace
represents the weapon of protection. The translucent fencing points to the
evolving nature of gross existence which does not attain its gross nature till
it reaches the land of the living.

These myths have
evoked powerful archetypal imagery in the human psyche in order to purify and
help evolve to our higher nature over the last 5000 years.

Sunday, May 6, 2012

Yeshua said,
"If the flesh came into being because of spirit, that is a marvel, but if
spirit came into being because of the body, that is a marvel of marvels. Yet I
marvel at how this great wealth has come to dwell in this poverty." …………Gospel of Thomas: Saying 29

First of all we
have to look at the process of human manifestation as being a process
incarnation. The word ‘incarnation’ comes from the Latin root ‘caro,
carnis=flesh’. Life is bestowed into the basic inanimate matter due to the
Spirit, which can be called by different names. One that I am comfortable with
and which rings true to what we discover both in science and in the deeper
philosophical enquiry is Divine or Universal consciousness.

It is indeed a
great marvel how the atoms and molecules, which constitute the fundamental
components of the nearly 100 trillion cells in the human body, become alive and
duplicate themselves and create higher orders of complexity to form organs and
the entire complex of a human being. This is the marvel of life as we see it.
But this process of observation both through the scientific path or the
intuitive path of the supramental domain requires the operation of the physical
body. Unless life is sustained in the body, conscious observation can not take
place. Hence understanding this deep truth, Yeshua, declares that “spirit came
into being because of the body, that is a marvel of marvels.”

There is an
inseparable bond which gets established between the flesh and the Spirit once
incarnation is initiated. In the Canonical Gospels the various reference to the
flesh and the Spirit and their relationship is rather dualistic and does not amplify
the inner bond that can be discerned once we understand the true process of
incarnation.

We need to
understand the words in the Gospel of John where there is a references to the
flesh and the Spirit. “Flesh gives birth to flesh, but the Spirit gives birth
to spirit.” ……….John 3:6

It is true that
we inherit the material body from our parents but the individual consciousness
is the direct inheritance from the Divine Spirit. But also we have to
understand that our bodies and their constituents and hence our parentage are
all chosen by the Spirit.

Prophet Jeremiah
declares: “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, before you were born I
set you apart; I appointed you as a prophet to the nations.”………..Jeremiah 1:5

This is true for
every human being which is born.

This is the
reason that in the above saying Yeshua says “flesh came into being because of
spirit”

Note carefully
the words that are used. Spirit begets the flesh
which means the basic constituents of material nature are the result of the
pure nature of the Spirit. This is very true
as we now understand that all fundamental components of the atom are
nothing but pure energy in various modes of vibration. But the body, which means the composite nature
of human manifestation, when viewed from an integral dimension, embodies the
individual consciousness or the Spirit, which has been subject to modification.

It is a great
cosmic wonder how this marvellous attribute of consciousness (spirit) resides
in an individual body and provides a life of self awareness and perception
through which we are bestowed with a capacity to comprehend the action of the
Spirit on a Universal dimension.

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